Practical tips for small biz owners

It’s easy to forget the the simplest SEO tasks when you’re busy. Search engines can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site, but only if you’re consistent about doing the SEO work.

Here’s a simple checklist reminder for the next time you post on your blog or add a new page to your site. This list doesn’t include overarching SEO techniques for your entire website, but focuses on the everyday tasks when adding new content to a site which is already optimized for SEO.

Choose keywords appropriate to the page; don’t simply replicate the website keywords on every page. Ask yourself, “What does my visitor want from this page or blog post?”

Title tag

Description tag

Alt tag for images

Image file names

Social sharing fields (title, snippet, image)

Using your keywords in the headings and sub-headings

Keyword in page URL (aka “slug”) (and domain name, if possible)

Keywords in text: don’t stuff them in, but having them near each other (“proximity”) helps; put them closer to the top of the page.

Links to internal pages

Links to external pages (make sure it’s a reputable site)

If you’re using WordPress, choose one of the SEO plugins, like Yoast, to make it easier. It gives you easy-to-complete fields for data entry on the tags and snippets, and reminds you if your SEO isn’t strong for that page.

If you have a Category or Round Up page that shows popular posts on a specific topic, add the new post/page to that directory for your website.

You can check where you currently rank for your keywords in Google Analytics. It’s the Queries report: Acquisition>Search Console>Queries